creative technology

Sound operator GUI

Created this GUI in Pure Data which allows me to playback sound samples and do some live effects, such as reverb and equalizer balance. There’s also features like fade in/out, spatialization of sound, stop/pause/play, skipping to any track position and speeding up/ slowing down the sound playback. It’s still a little buggy and not perfect though. This patch is to be used for a live theatre performance so I need to make sure it really works. Now I’m adding a midi controller so that I have real knobs and sliders instead of using the mouse to operate the sound.

This has been quite a challenging project and I realise even after doing this that I still don’t know a lot about Pure Data, and there’s a lot more to learn. For example, it can manipulate video using the GEM extension. I believe that to use Pure Data really well, you need to understand audio physics somewhat, such as modulation, synthesis, the fourier transform and so on.

One cool feature of this software is that many people can work together on the same patch live on the internet and create music together. For me, the best thing is that it’s an open source software, meaning that there’s a vibrant online community contributing to the platform development and help forums.